Joseph Leycester Lyne
[3]: 494 His biographer, Baroness Beatrice de Bertouch, four years before his death, described it as the event, "which not only endangered his life" but also "was the cause of a distressing condition of nerve collapse, the effects of which he feels to this day".
Bertouch saw it as "the culminating link in a heavy chain of influences, and one which was destined to throw a strange psychological glamour over the entire atmosphere of this devotional and emotional career.
He became curate to George Rundle Prynne, vicar of St Peter's, Plymouth, and soon started a guild for men and boys, called the Society of the Love of Jesus,[1]: 92 with himself as superior.
Prynne, to Lyne's mother, wrote: "He was animated by a very true spirit of devotion in carrying out such work as was assigned to him; and his earnest and loving character largely won the affections of those among whom he ministered.
The innovation was challenged by Charles Lowder, founder of the Society of the Holy Cross, his ritualist vicar, and after nine months Lyne resigned rather than abandon his monastic dress.
This Third Order consisted of men, women and children bound by solemn promise to obey five definite rules regulating: The Bishop of Norwich, John Pelham, refused him a licence to preach and subsequently inhibited him.
[3]: 495 Special masses were celebrated for the community by the sympathetic vicar in St Laurence's Church, Norwich, at Lyne's instigation, produced further conflicts between him and the bishop.
In 1866, owing to a flaw in the title-deeds, Lyne found himself dispossessed of his Elm Hill property, and he moved to a house in Chale, Isle of Wight, lent him by Pusey.
In 1867 he moved to Laleham and in Feltham nearby he started another Anglican religious order, a Benedictine enclosed convent for women, who subsequently entered into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.
His conduct was so extravagant, however, that he was suspended, from officiating or preaching in the Diocese of London, by Bishop Archibald Tait;[3]: 495 "owing in part to the action taken by [Ignatius] in respect to a lady whom he proposed to 'solemnly excommunicate from our Holy Congregation'.
His father, who had persistently opposed his son's extreme Anglican practices, repudiated him altogether after his mother's death in 1877, and publicly denounced his conduct and doctrines.
On 12 December 1872 he appeared as the champion of Christianity in an interesting public encounter with Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the National Secular Society, in the Hall of Science in Old Street, London.
[e] On his return he initiated a petition to the archbishops and convocation for measures against historical criticism of the scriptures;[3]: 495 and at the Birmingham Church Congress of 1893 he denounced future Bishop of Oxford Charles Gore for his 1890 essay "The Holy Spirit and inspiration" in Lux Mundi.
[11]: 129 It was, according to Desmond Morse-Boycott, in Lead, Kindly Light, his accepting ordination "at the hands of a wandering (Old Catholic) bishop, who was an adventurer" that discredited him with the Church of England which "denied him the priesthood".
David Hilliard wrote in Victorian Studies that an "Anglo-Catholic underworld" produced groups "whose members delighted in religious ceremonial and the picturesque neo-Gothic externals of monastic life."
Hilliard wrote that those groups did not enforce strict criteria for entry and "it is likely that they were especially attractive to homosexually inclined young men who felt themselves drawn to the male environment of a monastic community and the dramatic side of religion.
"[18] An example cited by Hilliard was an incident, published on 17 September 1864 in the Norfolk News,[g] that occurred at Elm Hill Priory in which a monk, Brother Augustine, wrote a love letter to a boy, an apprentice printer, who sang in the choir.
The newspaper included the following passage in an editorial about the situation published a week later:We tell "Ignatius" plainly, and we tell everybody else connected with this establishment who has the slightest power of reflection, that the herding together of men in one building, with the occasional letting in of young girls—some of them morbid, some of them silly and sentimental—and of boys likewise, with soft, sensitive temperaments, cannot fail to produce abominations.
[h]A year later the community at Elm Hill Priory was almost destroyed when James Barrett Hughes, known as Brother Stanislaus, rebelled against Lyne's authority, then fled with a boy, Francis George Nobbs, who eventually became known as ex-monk Widdows, from the Guild of St William.
[1]: 273–275, 281 [19] In 1868 Hughes became a popular guest speaker at Protestant platforms in London and other places, where he scandalised his audiences with revelations of the "semi-Popish and improper practices" of Ignatius and other ritualists.
"[20] At a different meeting in London, two Norwich youths "made frightful charges, utterly unfit for publication, against a monk" which Hilliard wrote were a reference to Brother Augustine.
[i] Another case was revealed on 18 February 1869, in the Marylebone Police Court, while both men were summoned, on charges of drunkenness and disorder in the public street, the magistrate gathered that both lived some six years back at the Elm Hill Priory and had a sexual relationship.
Bertouch wrote that Nobbs "was reported to have affirmed that not only had the Superior [Ignatius] been aware of their degeneracy, but that he had condoned and encouraged it, by performing on their behalf, and in his own church, a ceremony which in itself was blasphemy and sacrilege of the most revolting kind."
[3]: 496 The abbey was left to the few remaining monks, subject to the right of an adopted son, William Leycester Lyne; in 1911 it passed into the hands of the Anglican Benedictine community of Caldey Island.
A considerable collection of archives and artefacts has been assembled under the auspices of the Trust, most of which is housed at the Abergavenny Museum; the tabernacle which formerly stood on the high altar of the abbey church and various pictures are cared for by the present owners of the monastery but are not normally on view.
